Februarie 17, 2013

On the Importance of Holocaust Revisionism—A Reply to Alan Hart

By Thomas Dalton, Ph.D for Veterans Today

In the past two weeks, Veterans Today has published three pieces on Holocaust revisionism by Alan Hart, and one set of reflections by Jim Dean and Paul Eisen. Any discussion of this topic is welcome, given its central importance in American life today.

However, Hart, in particular, perpetuates some false and misleading ideas about the matter, and thus a reply is called for.

Let me begin with a few points that Hart has correct. There are, in fact, three essential elements to the event called the Holocaust:

(1) intention to mass murder the Jews, by Hitler and the Nazi elite;

(2) the use of gas chambers; and

(3) the 6 million deaths.

If any one of these three should undergo substantial revision, then, technically speaking, we no longer have “The Holocaust”—at least, not in any meaningful sense. (Broadly speaking, of course, any mass fatality is a holocaust.) Holocaust revisionism contends that, not one, but all three of these points are grossly in error, and thus that “The Holocaust,” as such, did not occur. Obviously, this is not to deny that a tragedy happened to the Jews, nor that many thousands died, directly and indirectly, as a result of the war. But the conventional account is an extreme exaggeration.

Hart’s treatment of these issues is woefully inadequate. On the first point, he claims that the Nazis did indeed have a program of mass murder, and that they deliberately and systematically implemented it—but only after the British abandoned their commitment to Zionism in May 1939. And yet, he offers no evidence that this was a major turning point in German policy. I am unaware that any such evidence exists.

In fact, all available evidence suggests a consistent policy of enforced evacuation and deportation, throughout the Nazi era. The Germans wanted a Reich free of Jews, and thus they corralled them into camps, and then systematically evacuated them to the Eastern regions. Yes, many would die in the process; a regrettable loss. But this is ethnic cleansing, not genocide—something the Israelis are eminently familiar with.

To argue for mass killing, Hart relies almost entirely on ten entries from the Goebbels diary. Unfortunately he has a very superficial knowledge of this subject. Had he done even a bit of research, he would have found my on-line article, “Goebbels on the Jews” (www.inconvenienthistory.com).

There I examine 132 separate entries, covering the final nine years of his life. Roughly 90% refer only to evacuation and deportation. There is not one entry on industrial mass killings, not one entry on gas chambers,not one entry on Auschwitz. Even in the most damning cases, Goebbels uses ambiguous wording such asVernichtung and Ausrottung, which refer simply to complete elimination or removal; neither term entails killing.

In fact only a single entry, in March 1945, refers explicitly to the killing of Jews—which is unexplainable, if his policy was indeed one of mass murder. He had no reason to cover up the truth in his own private diary.

Hart’s one other bit of evidence, Himmler’s well-known Posen speech of 1943, explicitly equates deportation withAusrottung, or “extermination.” The full phrase is, “I am now thinking of the evacuation of the Jews, theAusrottung [‘extermination’] of the Jewish people. … [I]t is in our program: deactivation [Ausschaltung] of the Jews…” It was their presence and their power that was to be eliminated.

Regarding the gas chambers, very little can be determined from the Jewish Auschwitz survivors, even ones we trust. What, after all, did they see? Jews forcibly sent to the camp, under appalling wartime conditions. Families separated, never to meet again. People dying from typhus, dysentery, and other diseases. Cans of deadly Zyklon poison (for fumigation of lice). Dead bodies. Corpses being burned in crematoria. But all these things are completely comprehensible—and in fact expected—in a wartime concentration camp. None of this entails mass murder in gas chambers.

What none of the survivors have seen is 2,000 live Jews forced into an underground chamber, Zyklon pellets dumped on their heads, and then 2,000 dead bodies hauled out. And the fact that no one has seen this strongly suggests that it never happened.

Independently, it is an utterly ludicrous way to kill masses of people: packing victims into an underground room with military-like precision, dumping cyanide pellets on them (that continue to out-gas for two or three hours), and then gingerly hauling out dead body after dead body without killing yourself or your worker-slaves. And the job’s not done yet: now load four or five dead bodies at a time on a small freight elevator, to send them up two floors to the crematoria ovens, where it takes one full hour to incinerate one body—hardly the streamlined industrial killing operation that we’ve been sold.

Furthermore, few (including Hart) realize that Zyklon was the alleged murder weapon for ‘only’ one million Jews; another two million were allegedly killed in carbon monoxide gas chambers, primarily at Treblinka and Belzec. Unfortunately this is yet an even more ridiculous scheme: to pump engine exhaust into a sealed, airtight room packed with people. The alleged diesel engines put out far too little CO gas to be effective, and in any case one cannot pump exhaust gas into a sealed space. For that matter, with an airtight room available, one has only to shut the door and wait 30 minutes—and all would suffocate! The entire gassing scheme collapses into absurdity.

As to the third point, that the “6 million” figure might be a considerable exaggeration, Hart simply says, “so what!” In fact, the best revisionist estimates suggest that perhaps 500,000 Jews died during the war years—a staggering 90% reduction from the claimed number. Well—so what? Historical accuracy, for one; when speaking of the “greatest crime in the history of humanity,” we should at least get our numbers straight. Secondly, this would reduce the Jewish death toll to barely 1% of the total war dead, turning it into a mere footnote of history.

But most importantly, it makes starkly clear the degree to which the world has been bamboozled by the international Jewish Lobby. The sheer fact that large portions of the public and academia have been cowed into accepting a patently false storyline—one that serves only to benefit a small Jewish minority—is beyond reprehensible. It is criminal; and the criminals ought to be called to account.

Hart is right to say that the Holocaust is used to bully America and the European nations into subservience, and to cast a collective guilt upon all parties involved in the war. The guilt trip works the best, incidentally, on the level of the individual, and it keeps otherwise knowledgeable and ethical people from speaking out against Israeli crimes. It keeps Americans from demanding that their government stop supplying some $6 billion per year in aid to Israel; stop providing diplomatic cover in the U. N.; and stop the stranglehold on Congress and our foreign policy. By exposing this fraud, Germany and the other extorted nations would be right to demand repayment of hundreds of billions of dollars; now there would be a first step on the path to justice.

All this is only the tip of the Holocaust iceberg. The full story is spelled out in my recent book, Debating the Holocaust (www.debatingtheholocaust.com). There, the reader is invited to judge for himself.

Finally, as to Hart’s contention that the truth-seeking revisionists are evil, and the lying, fraudulent, Holocaust blackmailers ought to get a free pass—well, that speaks for itself.